


In Which Paul Doesn't Know How He Got There

by orphan_account



Series: MQSTB [3]
Category: Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Angst, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Outtake, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-02
Updated: 2011-03-02
Packaged: 2017-11-07 03:13:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/426315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Outtake Two for Miror Quaenam Sis Tam Bella. Paul's point of view of Chapter Six: In Which Bella Steals a Pillow. Contains spoilers for the main story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Which Paul Doesn't Know How He Got There

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to grrlinterrupted for pre-reading. Twilight belongs to Stephenie Meyer. Music for this outtake: "Love Out of Lust" by Lykke Li.

[](http://tinypic.com?ref=14972tk)

  


Pretty pretty outtakes banner by UntilWeBleed

  


The minute Isabella leaves, Paul collapses again. He’s been this way for the last two days, lying on his belly in the fucking forest like a wounded animal waiting to die. He doesn’t really want to die but at this point he’s willing to admit to himself that it would make things a hell of a lot easier.

He wants to be angry at her for seeking him out, but he knows it wasn’t her fault. It was the goddamn imprint, of course, pulling the two of them together whether they fucking want it or not (he feels the instant she drives across the border into reservation territory and it makes his muscles burn with wanting to run to her). She’s so thin now; she’s even thinner than she was the morning he spent at her house. Her words echo in his head: _It's weird; the hungrier you get, the hungrier I get. And I'm losing weight, too. You've got to eat something or you'll turn me into a skeleton, and you know you thought I didn't weigh enough before this._

He can’t do that to her. He’s not sure she’ll give in and eat, if he stays in wolf form. He’s not sure she can, any more than he can ignore how much she needs him to eat so she can stay healthy.

_I don’t think I can walk away from you._

He wishes to fuck he could, for both their sakes.

No, that’s a lie. For her sake. It would only be for her, the way _everything’s_ for her, now.

After it gets dark, Paul heads down to his house. He waits in the shadows for his mom to leave, trying to ignore the pang of guilt he feels as she walks to her car, forehead furrowed in worry the way it always is when he gets in trouble. _I’m doing the right thing,_ he wants to tell her. _I don’t want to fuck someone else up._ But he stays silent and waits till she pulls away from the house.

Just before he phases, he feels the full-body shiver that lets him know another of the pack has phased into wolf form.

It's Jacob. _Hey, Paul. Bells wanted to tell you—_ Instantly his mind fills with images of Isabella, lying down on that piece-of-shit couch in Jacob’s garage, hand over her eyes, complaining about her head, asking about Paul, snarling at him _(still don’t know what the hell that was about,_ Jacob muses to himself, and Paul suppresses a surge of smug triumph) making dinner, laughing with the Blacks while Jacob notices the tightness around her eyes and mouth that mean she’s in pain— _that she made dinner for you, if you want to eat it. Your mom let me drop it off a little bit ago. There’s cake too. Bells made me save you half._

Jacob’s still wondering about his Bells biting his head off when he tried to walk with her, wondering enough that he barely spares a thought as to why she’d want to be sure Paul eats— _guess she wants to help like Emily always does—_ and Paul answers him before he can go there.

_All right._ He phases back to human before Jacob can say anything else.

It’s been so long since he took human form that he just stays on his hands and knees for a second, reorienting himself to a body that needs to walk on two legs rather than four, a brain that depends on sight more than scent, a head that goes dizzy with hunger and sleep deprivation rather than lethargic. When he’s sure he can, he rises to his feet, cursing at himself for being such a pussy, and walks slowly, deliberately, into the house, telling himself the pace is because he refuses to hurry and not because he’s unsure he can go any faster.

His mom left the house unlocked, most likely on the off-chance he might come home.He can’t shove down the guilt enough to ignore it, and that pisses him off, so he slams the door shut behind him and stalks to the kitchen.

Enough food to feed six normal people waits for him in the refrigerator, so that should be just barely enough for him. He doesn’t bother to heat it up. He’s so hungry the pork chops taste amazing even cold, as do the potatoes, green beans, and stewed apples. Isabella really made an effort—she must be worried. That makes him happy even though he wants to kick his own ass for feeling that way.

Once he’s not starving anymore, he can’t stand the feeling of his own skin and heads straight to the shower. He scrubs over and over again until at last he feels clean. It takes five attempts.

His mistake comes when he heads to his bedroom to get his clothes.

In his hurry, he forgot what she told him: _I have your pillow, I’m sorry but I took it. I left my shirt under your other pillow._ He remembers the instant he crosses the threshold into his room and the scent hits his nose like a line of cocaine, slapping his face and making his head go light with its impact. His knees weaken underneath him; he barely manages to stay upright long enough to stagger over to his bed and collapse on the spot where he knows, he _knows_ she lay when she visited his house. He rests his head on the pillow that remains and—oh fuck. Fuck, fuck, that was a huge mistake, because it’s still there, the smell of her hair and her skin and the faintest remnant of salt on the pillowcase, which means that, shit, she was _crying_ when she came here. The guilt and shame tear at him— _I’m such an asshole, I’m the one who did this to her_ —but then the next part of what she said flashes through his memory again.

_I left my shirt under your other pillow._

With hands that aren’t quite steady, he reaches under his head and pulls it out. Just another of those t-shirts she wears constantly, usually covered by a flannel or hoodie, no print or anything. A completely boring article of clothing, if it weren’t for the fact that it used to be on Isabella’s body.

He knows it’s a dumbass move even while he makes it, but he does it anyway, burying his face into the fabric and inhaling, an addict who’s gone too long since his last fix and knows this one will barely tide him over—

And suddenly he’s outside again, with no memory of how he got there, but his shorts are tied to his leg like normal as he runs flat-out toward Forks, unable to turn around even though he tries. His body doesn’t belong to him anymore, even less so now than it has since he started phasing, but it does belong to _her,_ and he knows she needs it. He wants to believe she needs _him_ but he knows that’s bullshit. She needs someone like Jacob, who knows how to take care of broken things and broken people and will figure out how to fix her.

Speaking of Jacob, he’s in Paul’s head. _Are you feeling okay, man? Hey, where are you going?_

_Fuck off, Jake, it’s none of your goddamn business._ Paul tries hard to concentrate on the ground beneath his paws so Jacob can’t get a clue about where he is.

_Holy shit, Paul, I’m just asking a damn question._

_Jake._ It’s Sam. He must have phased while Paul was in the house. _I need you to go check on Seth. Do it in human form._

_Fine._ Jake’s curt with Sam, just like always, but he obeys.

Leah’s there, but she remains silent. Her mind is a constant replay of her father clutching his chest and collapsing while her mother screams and Seth snarls by her side and she realizes _Oh shit oh shit Seth just turned into a motherfucking wolf_ and then she notices he’s not the only one and nothing will ever be all right again, nothing.

Sam ignores her—he doesn’t know what else to do, Paul can tell—and tells Paul, _Do what you gotta do, man. You want me to lift the order?_

Paul’s about to beg him to do so when he sees her house and before he knows what he’s doing, he’s human again. He’s got his shorts on before he knows he’s picked them up, and he’s climbing through her window before he realizes he’s jumped to the sill.

She’s sitting at her desk, brushing her wet hair out, flinching with every stroke of the brush as it touches her head. He remembers: the headache. He’s panting, trying to find the strength to move back the way he came, and failing, when she leans to the side and freezes.

Oh, shit. She can see him in the mirror.

Isabella starts to turn, and half-crazed, half-relieved, he almost dives out the window again, but she seems to remember at the last second— _Sam told me he ordered you not to see my face in your head_ —and instead lowers her head to stare at the desk. He’s frozen, caught between the opposing forces that seek to govern his decisions, the wolf snarling _mine mine mine take what’s mine,_ and his mind saying _leave now, dickhead, before you fuck up her life even more._ His body just _aches_ , it never fucking stops aching anymore, and his heart is going to explode, it’s pounding so hard with love, lust and fear.

Isabella gets up and slowly makes her way to her bed, keeping her face turned away, clicking off her lamp before climbing onto the mattress. She curls up on her side, looking at the wall. Her breath is coming faster and faster. He can smell her arousal and oh, fuck, if he thought it was bad back in his room this is a hundred times worse, the scent surrounding him like fog, clouding his sight and making him feel like he might pass out before he can make it to her.

He hears her lips part.

_“Please,”_ she moans.

And he’s naked in bed with her. _How the fuck did I get here?_ he wonders, while his hands shove her clothes out of the way and frantically slide across the exposed skin, trying to make up for the past week’s deprivation in the space of sixty seconds. She shudders beneath his touch and starts to turn, and if she does that he’ll have to go so he clutches at her, begging, _“Please no please no please,”_ like a pathetic whiny bitch, but she doesn’t despise his weakness, only curls in front of him enough to let his cock slide inside her.

For a moment, he doesn’t see or hear or smell anything; every other sense is sublimated by the feeling of her surrounding him again. When the white light clears and his eyes work again, he’s got his arm around her and she’s clutching at it, moaning and whimpering between her teeth while he slams into her as hard as he can, as if he can somehow force himself deep enough to make everything else fall away.She bends double, moving him with her, as she surrenders to her orgasm, screaming into her pillow while her pussy clenches around him like a fist. It’s so tight it almost hurts. It does hurt. His stomach hurts and his heart hurts and he can’t even care when he feels hot tears leaking from the corners of his eyes onto her head. She doesn’t scorn that, either; her hand comes up and caresses his cheek while she murmurs to him, nonsense sounds that feel like kisses to soothe the pain. Her compassion only makes him feel more shitty about his inability to leave her alone. He hears the pained noise come out of his throat; it sounds like a sick dog.

He can’t do this. He can’t _not_ do this. He moves, rolling her to all fours while he curls into her back, just like all those times he dreamed except it’s infinitely worse because she’s so much more kind to him than he imagined. He thrusts into her, the mind-blowing pleasure of the heat and the wet and the sound of her whining underneath him almost outweighing the self-loathing that builds alongside the excitement.

Isabella cries out again, and the caress of her internal muscles sends him over the edge. Once again, his vision fades to white. When he can move again, he lies down on his side, bringing her with him.

“Stay,” she whispers, still not looking at him. His Isabella. _“I’m good with weird,”_ she told Jacob, all those weeks ago, and she was telling the truth.

“Can’t,” he moans. He’s got to leave, before he fucks this up even more, before she starts to hate him for what he’s taken from her—

“Need you,” she tells him, and that’s it. He can’t move. He nods against her shoulder, trying not to cry again. She lifts his hand to her mouth and kisses it, over and over again. The tenderness of the gesture does him in; he presses his forehead to the crook of her neck and tries to turn the sobs that want to break free into a sigh. Probably it works, because she falls asleep.

He lies there, afraid to sleep, afraid to wake her, until dawn, when at last his will overcomes the paralysis and he can pull her pajamas into place, cover her with her blanket, close the window, and sneak through the back door.

Once he hits the forest, he phases, and he doesn’t stop running north for hours.


End file.
